Artur Banaszewski and Jacob Saliba over at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog:
In 1987, just a few years before the end of the Cold War, Judith Shklar invited the eminent Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski to deliver a lecture at Harvard University. “Do not feel that you are under any pressure to talk about Marxism or any similarly restricted topic”—Shklar assured. By the 1980s, Kołakowski was regarded as a scholarly authority on Marxism. To the surprise of many, he decided to present “Politics and the Devil.” Already in the lecture hall, the audience was left rather confused: the “devil?” in “history?” For most of the lecture, Kołakowski engaged with theological discourses of God and Hell as well as offered interpretations of St. Basil, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and more. Present, that day, at the lecture was an up-and-coming Tony Judt who also struggled to follow the argument. It was not until Timothy Garton Ash leaned over and whispered to him that he realized the point to the lecture: “He really is talking about the Devil.”
Tony Judt recounts this anecdote in Kołakowski’s obituary published in the New York Review of Books in 2009, one year before his own passing. By suggesting that Kołakowski was “the last Central European intellectual,” he was not merely deploring the loss of an eyewitness to Europe’s turbulent twentieth-century history. Judt expressed his esteem for the Polish philosopher and his work on more than one occasion. In his essays, Judt placed Kołakowski alongside key intellectual figures of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus, among others. In Thinking Twentieth Century, his final conversation with Timothy Snyder, Judt remarked that his most influential book, Past Imperfect, was very much written from a “Central European perspective” (212). In Judt’s own words, he considered Kołakowski “an object of unstinting admiration and respect” (198). When writing history, biographies can be as influential as events and ideas—and such was the case with Judt’s reverence for Kołakowski.
More here.
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A problem most of us have, perhaps especially women, is that when we are in the mood to have sex reinvent our lives—when we feel dirty, restless, eager to be used and witnessed—we lay around wishing for someone intuitive and creative to come along and recognize a kindred spirit in us. We walk into bars and parties as if we’re adolescents hoping to be recognized on the street by a talent scout. We know that if someone would just give us what we want, without us having to describe it, we would amaze them and ourselves. It humiliates and disappoints us when everyone who comes sniffing just feels “kind of… cheesy,” as you put it. The intention of sex voice is to conjure a mutual fantasy, to invoke a shared scene—but the question remains: Whose scene is it? We each have the opportunity (and, really, the imperative) to direct the erotic scene for ourselves—and this includes women who wish on the whole to be submissive. I don’t mean leading in sex; I mean adjusting, with a light touch, the direction in which we hope the scene will tend.
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The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who is celebrated in these two books published to accompany the exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin marking the 250th anniversary of his birth, has fascinated me all my life. When I was at school, his mysterious and emotive paintings started to appear on the covers of the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics series: Abbey in the Oakwood on the cover of Hermann Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund; Woman at a Window (the woman’s back turned, one shutter open to the spring morning and the riverbank) on that of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. Covers featuring Sea of Ice, with its unfathomable grey-blue sky, and the yearning, autumnal Moonwatchers soon followed. Every image was memorable; every one hinted at emotional and spiritual depths embodied in northern European landscapes and places.
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